Sheep's Clothing
by E. Gray
Summary: A vignette. "He didn’t like that he, for any reason, should even be capable of surprising her. Unfortunately, he also had the impression it was one of the reasons she kept him around."


Note: This story was written with the intention of being set around Chapter 179, when Watanuki is teaching the woman who will not eat the food she makes herself. I realize without this disclaimer it could be assumed to be set much later.  
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"**Sheep's Clothing"  
**An xxxHolic Vignette

_By E. Gray_  
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Now that he thought about it, he couldn't remember the last time he'd _actually_ seen her.

But, then again, that was nothing new. With the way things had been going, that was just one more among who knew how many important pieces of information he had suddenly and completely forgotten in the timeline of the last few weeks. Except that it wasn't like forgetting so much as misplacing. If he'd merely forgotten, he couldn't have even realized there was something he had failed to recall. But these things he'd lost, they were more like holes. Cavernous, dark spaces on the canvas of his mind, where a name or a face should have been, but wasn't.

It was bad enough that anymore, he couldn't even tell the difference between being awake and being asleep. But now, just about every time he closed his eyes, he could be sure she would be there waiting for him in various imagined yet eerily familiar scenarios. Sometimes, everything about Yuuko Ichihara seemed like that: imagined. Eerily familiar for no reason at all.

For all Watanuki knew, probably there _was_ a reason for that. Just one he didn't understand, one that Yuuko-san either wasn't telling him; maybe would only tell him for a price. That certainly wouldn't shock him any. As excitable as he had once been, things just didn't take him quite by surprise as they once had.

Right. Maybe all he had to do was ask the question the right way, and she'd tell him. For a price, of course. One got the feeling that no matter how much Yuuko-san disclosed, it was never the entire story. The whole story would likely require too expensive a fee. Who knew how much he'd already paid her in indentured labor, but by now, it was entirely beside the point.

Whatever the point _was_ anymore. Watanuki didn't know. Or maybe he just couldn't remember. Sometimes it seemed like before he'd met Yuuko-san, there had been nothing about his life to even bother forgetting, let alone remembering. Whatever it was that he'd been up to every night before he was working in her shop, he was sure it had been uneventful; quiet. Having a lack of pressing errands or family dramas to attend to had clearly afforded him the time to perfect his cooking skills.

But thinking about that, chopping and boiling in the silence of his tiny one room apartment until he was exhausted, all that effort for no one but himself…it seemed so…

"Watanuki?"

Pointless.

"Watanuki…" There she was, stretched out like a cat on the elaborate Turkish divan, except not. Since he was probably, you know, asleep again. Insomuch as he was ever really asleep.

When he walked, it was less like walking and more like swimming. The space between him and everything else was too thick, at least thicker than it should have been. It had been like this when he'd last met Sakura-chan and Syaoran-kun, wherever they really were. But who knew if it was really just a meaningless dream. He didn't know anymore. He never really had to begin with.

"You know there is no such thing as _just_ a dream." She said this without looking at him, flattened out on the violet cushions as though melting like a candle in the merciless summer heat. He made no immediate reaction to her apparent ability to read his thoughts. Since he was likely asleep, this didn't seem like it should have surprised him much, even if she expected it to.

"I should have known you'd say that. Why do I bother talking anymore, anyway?"

"Who knows?" she intoned conversationally, reaching indolently over her head for a tall, thin glass of a queer, emerald colored drink sweating on the end table. "Why does anybody do anything?"

Watanuki already knew the end to this, and took the opportunity to answer while she was sitting up to drain part of her curious green highball. In the back of his mind, he wondered if he'd made it for her and couldn't remember. If indeed there was no such thing as just a dream. "_Hitsuzen_, I imagine…"

From over the rim of the glass, her lips pressed into a lazy smile. "Clever boy, Watanuki."

"Yuuko-san…" He continued approaching her with his slow, swimming creep. Why his instincts still demanded he slink up on her like he might a volatile predator, he had no idea. "…when are you coming _back_?"

At this, her lazy, all-knowing smirk deflated, turning almost sad before his eyes. Something which made him inexplicably uncomfortable, and made him desperately want to take the back what he had felt was a fairly innocuous question. To just fish it out of that suffocating, thick space between them and shove it back into his mouth before she could hear it and make that unexpectedly affected face.

"Can't say just yet…" Her eyes flicked away from him casually, her usual ease of calm collectedness back in place as though it had never wavered. She always behaved as though nothing could ever surprise her. Like she'd seen the past and future play over and over again; watched it like reruns of syndicated television shows or old movies on late night TV. Something she'd seen so many times that it did nothing but bore her in the crushing ennui of its indefatigable predictability.

To Yuuko Ichihara, even hidden from the world by her sobriquet, everything in life was nothing if not painfully obvious. She made everything seem like a tiresome chore to even think about, and even more so when she felt compelled to explain its tedious clockwork to him as though explaining a brainlessly simple mechanism to a child. That's why any emotion on her face made him so uneasy. He didn't like that he, for any reason, should even be capable of surprising her. Unfortunately, he also had the impression it was one of the reasons she kept him around.

That maybe he was the only person she knew of that was capable of showing her anything new. He didn't like that, either.

"I told you before," he said, stuffing his hands idly into the pockets of his slacks, scowling just enough to make her smirk joyfully back. "I don't really remember you leaving. That I'm having trouble remembering all kinds of things…I did tell you, didn't I?"

"Aren't there things you'd rather not remember, Watanuki?"

The scowl twitched on his face. "I guess so. I don't remember that anymore, either. But losing those things along with everything else; I'm sure some of them are important to me…that they _mean_ something. Isn't it like trying to kill a spider with a hand grenade? Wiping out important memories just to get rid of something painful…?"

"How do you know if you don't remember?" Her impish smile always held a veiled challenge. It was tiresome.

"I don't, I guess…" he sighed balefully. "But there's nobody that only has bad memories…even if it's something small, there's always…something to look back on, you know…fondly. Don't you have any good memories, Yuuko-san?"

Again her smile turned watery, and she looked at him for what seemed like a moment longer than was really comfortable.

"Of course…" she confirmed vaguely, turning her glass up and draining the remaining contents before sitting slowly up, propped on one long, thin arm. She was in her fairly ornate version of traditional summer dress, which he didn't assume was best for the stifling summer heat. But Yuuko-san was nothing if not selectively practical.

"And you…" she said, turning her tall, empty glass in spidery fingers. "How do you manage to remember _me_ if you can't recall any of your memories?"

Now he had the distinct impression she was just being difficult. After all, there wasn't much in the world that Yuuko-san loved more than being difficult for no other reason than she was bored. A lot of her behavior could be explained, if not excused, by this continuing curse of crushing tedium and endless, idle free time. Whatever time that wasn't occupied by lounging around drinking with Mokona, anyway.

As a dismissive reply, he shrugged. "Just lucky, I guess."

"Oh, but Watanuki," she said, slithering off the sofa with that slow, languid slide that made it seem that she'd just come from a planet with five times the gravity as Earth where, skinny as she was, she weighed 800 pounds. "Something equally unexpected but less fortunate...suddenly that's not considered lucky anymore, is it?"

Although he should have seen more mind games coming, he couldn't help but sigh. She'd been baiting that answer, hadn't she? "What you mean is that there is no such thing as luck, either, right?"

Yuuko approached him slowly, still holding the glass, the open neckline of her brightly colored muslin yukata pulled open just a little more than would normally be considered appropriate. Keeping his eyes where they belonged had become a science he had deftly mastered over the months out of necessity. Not that he wanted to look. There was just only so much a teenage boy could expect of himself.

"Merely that luck is subjective," she corrected breezily. "Nothing is as black and white as all that. Fortune isn't like flipping a coin. Things humans typically consider lucky…rabbit's feet, four leaf clovers, lucky underwear…those talismans in of themselves have no power. Their value is simply in the unwavering confidence that comes with believing something is genuinely swaying fortune in your favor."

"I would expect nothing less from you, Yuuko-san. Have you handed out a lucky charm to a client that has no power except their own confidence?" He didn't think there was anything unkind or accusatory about this statement. Indeed, it seemed that more often than not, Yuuko's services were of a more symbolic, subliminal type that honestly required little, if any, of her real power to grant wishes.

She looked through him with that ever-knowing smile, in such a way that he had the distinct feeling she meant him, which was pointless to infer. He already was quite sure she never intended to grant the wish he had asked of her all those months ago. She'd had different plans all along.

"In a way," she finally said.

Watanuki didn't much care for that answer, and frowned accordingly, which in contrast, made Yuuko's catlike grin broaden silently, that usual unspoken challenge burning there in her depthless, blah-looking eyes. How anyone could look so otherworldly and so bored-to-death at the same time, it was hard to explain without knowing Yuuko. But he supposed this more familiar smirk was preferable to that melancholic look she'd casted his way, perhaps inadvertently, earlier on. Thinking about it still bothered him, and he found himself changing the subject, although he'd simply intended to ask if she was finished with her cryptic remarks for the time being. Even if he _was_ asleep, he was pretty sure he had other things to do.

"You really can't tell me when you're coming back?" He asked her suddenly, without thinking about it. "I…don't like it, Yuuko-san. Can't you tell me what's going on?"

She ignored this completely. "What I mean is that having confidence and disguising it, calling it something else…doesn't really change the result. If you have to dress something up with special properties, if it's a rabbit's foot, a bell, a ring or even a pair of just plain, 100-yen sunglasses…the human mind creates its own obstacles and solutions, and helping it do so is patently the function of this shop. Do you understand?"

"Yes…" he said uncomfortably. "Sort of like selling snake oil, or a wolf wearing sheep's clothing." It wouldn't be the first time he'd thought either thing about her unique business venture, after all. He wondered immediately, though, if he should have said so aloud.

"Even those who buy snake oil often claim it accomplishes what it should, Watanuki, and a wolf wearing sheep's clothing is a lot more effective than a sheep wearing wolf's clothing."

A typical, exasperating, circuitous and puzzling Yuuko-brand statement if he'd ever heard one. "And why are you _telling_ me this?"

"Because it may come to pass that one day, you may need to reflect back on that advice," she said.

"But then, wouldn't you just _remind_ me?"

As a reply, her spindly long fingers caught at his face and tipped it up to hers, immediately sending his hair-trigger blush reflex into red-faced overdrive. Likely she was doing it just for that purpose; he was easier to rile up than a skittish cat. "Because the choice, at that time, may be yours alone to make," she said. "Do you remember what I told you? About what happens if you give more than is necessary for a price?"

Caught in the unexpected spider's web of her hands; the wintry press of her fingertips on his face as though they were really there, he found himself fighting back a strange emotion that was suspiciously close to panic. "Yuh-well, I…I think so…that it does damage…?"

"Indeed it does. On all the planes, the wheel of fortune does not tolerate incongruence, even when unintended. And above all things, a thing is not prized in any way, no matter its value in the eyes of society, it is worthless as a payment. Can you remember that?"

"Of…of course." What else could he really say? He could feel her breath on his face. It smelled like licorice and he shamefully felt himself flush even hotter when he randomly and inadvertently wondered against his will and better judgment if her mouth would taste the same.

"Good boy, Watanuki. I can always count on you, can't I?" She let him free and in a slipping of shadows and fading of white light, he was staring up at the traditional wooden crossbeams and light fixture of his room in the still very empty shop, panting for air as though he'd run an entire city block, greeted by the silence of the pale, radiant blue predawn hour; the echoing early morning birdsong, and a feverish blush burning like a wildfire across his cheeks.

He could still feel the cold print left by her fingers.


End file.
